Special notices are an important feature of professional technical writing: they highlight special information readers need to know to understand what they are reading, to accomplish what they want to do, to prevent damage to equipment, and to keep from hurting themselves or others.

Your task in this section is to learn the different types of special notices, their uses, and format.

In this section, and in this course, you use a specific style of notices. If you want to use a different style, get with your instructor. Otherwise, follow these guidelines in planning and designing special notices—they are your "specs"!

Notice alert readers to the possibility of error, damage, or injury. They also provide extra emphasis.

Use special notices to emphasize key points or warn or caution readers about damage or injury.

Be careful to use the types of special notices precisely, for their defined purposes. Use the four types of special notices in the following ways:

Note—To emphasize points or remind readers of something, or to indicate minor problems in the outcome of what they are doing.

Warning—To warn readers about the possibility of minor injury to themselves or others.

Caution—To warn readers about possible damage to equipment or data or about potential problems in the outcome of what they are doing.

Danger—To warn readers about the possibility of serious or fatal injury to themselves or others.

Deciding on which type of notice to use is not an exact science. Don't use a danger notice when a warning is more appropriate (the same as "crying wolf"). Also, use notices in a consistent way throughout a report. Do not create your own notices, such as putting "Important:" in place of "Warning."

Place special notices at the point in text where they are needed. For example, place a caution or danger notice before discussing a step in which readers might hurt themselves.

Avoid having too many special notices at any one point in the text. Otherwise, the effectiveness of their special format will be lost. (If you have too many, combine them.)

With warnings, cautions, and danger notices, explain the consequences of not paying attention to the notice. State what will happen if the reader does not heed the notice.

The examples in this section use bold. Avoid all-caps for the text of any special notice.

Note: Take a look around your garage or kitchen, and look at the special notices you see on products. You will see some variation, but these are likely to be dependent on specific industry standards.

Either tab to beginning of the text of the warning, or use the hanging-indent format (which is much better). Try for 0.25 to 0.5 inches of space between the end of the warning label and the beginning of the text. See headings for discuson and examples of hanging indents.

Use regular body font for the text of the warning notice (no bold, no italics, no all-caps, no color).

Align the warning notice with the text it refers to.

Skip the equivalent of one line above and below the warning notice.

Example of a warning notice. Use this one to alert readers to the possibility of minor injury.

Here are some additional points to consider concerning special notices:

Special alignment. Special notices must align to the text to which they refer. For example, if you have a note that adds some special detail to something in a bulleted list item, you must align that note to the text of the bulleted item. Of course, if the note follows a bulleted list but refers to the whole list, then you can use the regular left margin.

Singlespaced text. All of the examples and discussion in this unit are based on doublespaced text. For singlespaced text, use your document-design "eye" to decide on spacing. Leave either one blank lines between running text and special notices—depending on what looks best to you. (And of course both running text and the text of the special notices would be singlespaced.)

Placement of special notices. The standard rule is to place special notices before the point at which they are relevant. For example, you warn readers to back up all data before you tell them to reformat their hard drive. However, in practice this applies to serious special notices where great harm to data, equipment, or people is likely to ensue.

One technique used by very cautious writers (maybe those who have been burned) is to place all serious notices (warnings, cautions, and dangers) somewhere at the beginning of the document, and then repeat them individually where they apply.

Multiple special notices. You run into situations where you have three or four special notices, all jammed together in the same part of the text, each one following another. This is a problem because the whole point of the special formatting of the notices is lost: something is special because it is different from the surrounding. The solution to this problem is to create one identifying heading (for example, "Notes and Warnings"), and then list the notices (either bulleted or numbered) below it.